He overheard everything the man talking to Nero had said. He also remembered Nero’s earlier comment about the detector not working if the box was underground.
It wouldn’t take them long before they realized the box had not gone down the river. They would ignore anything Nero tried to tell them and return here to begin their search.
If he wasn’t gone by then, they would most likely kill him when they took the box. He had overheard the invasion plans for OZ and they would not leave any witnesses behind who could potentially warn somebody.
He had to get away from this place as quickly as possible if he hoped to live to see another sunrise. He had no idea where to go. He had never traveled into the Northern Territories before Nero led his army here to retrieve the box.
He had to hide it somewhere where it could not be detected by that device, and before anyone saw him with it.
Suddenly, the box felt heavier as he dragged it up the hill and away from the river.
For the first time in his life, Caleb was around others just like him. The entire town was filled exclusively with half-human half-animal hybrids and, when he walked through the market in town, he was greeted with smiles rather than gasps of horror because he looked more lion than human.
The Southern Marshal had broken years of silence and separatism to offer sanctuary for every hybrid in OZ. Eager to escape the persecution they suffered at the hands of humans, they accepted her offer and, for the first time in a decade, outsiders crossed the thousand-foot high ceramic wall that separated the Southern Territories from the rest of OZ.
When the last airship crossed over the wall, the border was closed again and all contact with the outside world was severed. The Southern Marshall had provided a safe harbor for the hybrids. She had even gone so far as to build an entire town specifically for them. A place where they could live in peace and harmony. And then she surrounded it with a fifty-foot tall electrified fence.
Officially, the fence was to keep out those who wanted to harm the hybrids. But Caleb knew deep down in his soul, the fence was really there to keep them in. He didn’t know why and he didn’t care to know why. He didn’t like to be caged up, regardless of the reason.
He was finding it difficult to shift from being Nero’s personal bodyguard and assassin to becoming the leader, by birthright, of the hybrid compound.
Everything was better inside the compound. The hybrids were not persecuted for being different and, as their leader, his word was law. As the ruler over this tiny kingdom, he could have anything he wanted. But the thing he wanted most was to leave.
Every morning he woke up with a list of royal obligations, things he needed to do as the king of his people. Yet every morning always ended the same way. With him looking out through the fence toward a freedom he might never attain again.
This was not to say he had never gone over the fence.
No prison, not even OZ itself, had ever been able to contain him. Despite always being able to leave, he always managed to return of his own free will. Maybe it was not so much free will as it was a sense of obligation. He returned to OZ, when he was younger, out of his obligation to Nero for rescuing him from death. He returned to the compound out of his obligation to the hybrid community, who saw him as their natural-born leader.
Whatever it was that always brought him back, he knew there was one person he would be willing to leave everything for and never once look back. But he had lost her the same day they climbed over that wall into the Southern Territories. It had been six months since they were captured and separated. Six long months of not knowing whether she was alive or dead.
Not a single one of the informants he’d cultivated outside the fence had brought him any word about her. It was as if she ceased to exist the moment she was taken away from him, and he was losing his grip on the hope that she was still alive.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture her face. It was getting harder each day, the details blurring into generalities under the relentless march of time. Imbalanced by the memory of all he had lost, he leaned in too close to the electrified wire fence, causing tufts of fur to lift up from his skin and stretch out in the direction of freedom. He ignored the smell of burning fur as some of the longer strands came in contact with the wire.
“You know, there are safer ways to cut your hair to a respectable length.”
His eyes snapped open and he regained his balance as he leaned back away from the fence.
Zee held a finger to her nose to block out the smell. She was one of the few hybrids that looked almost entirely human. If it weren’t for the soft coat of white fur with black striping over her entire body, she would never have been sent to live behind the fence.
“If you keep looking out that fence, you’ll miss everything we have in here.”
“We are caged in here like wild animals.”
“The fence is for our safety.”
“Safety from what?”
“You were sheltered from what the rest of us had to deal with, out there in the real world. We were second class citizens… no, third class citizens. We were not allowed in schools. We were not allowed to have jobs. The lucky ones were given menial and dehumanizing chores that just barely kept the rest of the family in poverty.”
He reached for the fence with a hand and stopped himself short of touching it. He could feel the warmth emanating off the wire.
“There has to be a better way than this.”
“I agree with you Caleb, but for most of us here this is the best we have ever had. Out there I worked as a sideshow attraction in a traveling circus. In here, I’m being taught clockwork engineering. If I test well this season, I might be one of the five taken this year to the Southern Marshal’s private university for further training.”
The wind kicked up and jostled the fence, the wire almost touching his outstretched palm. He lowered his hand and looked at her. “Have you asked yourself why, Zee?”
“Why what?”
“Why has the Southern Marshal taken such an interest in us?”
“I’ve learned not to question good fortune. She has given all of us more than she has taken away.”
He looked back through the fence. “Not all of us.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder. “You miss her, don’t you?”
“I think I shall never see her again.”
“I wouldn’t write her off that easily.”
“It’s been six months without a word.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said as she held up a small slip of paper.
He stared at the yellow stained paper gripped between two fingers.
“What is that?”
“Your word.”
He reached for the paper and she withdrew it back quickly. “Don’t jeopardize everything we have been given here for her.”
She offered it to him again and he snatched it out of her hand. “I just have to know that she’s safe.”
Fifteen kilometers from the hybrid compound, in the middle of one of the busiest trading cities in the Southern Territories, Darius, only sixteen years old but already showing signs that his hair pattern was following the family trait, paced back and forth in the back room of Uncle Jedediah’s small cottage.
Jedediah sat calmly at the kitchen table with his arms crossed over his enormous belly. “Stop being so nervous Nephew or your head will be as bald and shiny as mine before you’re twenty. Relax, he will be here soon.”
Darius gestured in the air with his arms as he spoke. “The Marshal has a twenty-four hour curfew on all government workers. If I’m caught outside the relay station like this, I’ll be killed on the spot as a spy.”
“Relax. You’ll be back before the lunchtime roll call.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does buy silence. Your share of the reward is more than enough to cover the costs to keep your little transgression from the ears of the Marshal.”
Darius let out a long steadying breath. “I sure hope you’re right Uncle.”
A knock at the front door stirred Jedediah from his chair. “That would be him now. You stay back here while I talk to him for a minute first.”
Darius grabbed Jedediah’s sleeve. “Get the money up front.”
Jedediah patted his cheek and smiled. “That’s what I’m going to talk about. You just wait here.”
Darius held his breath as he listened to his uncle unlatch the front door. In a few minutes he would tell the stranger what he knew, collect his reward and head back to the relay station before the Southern Marshal’s security forces even knew he was gone.
He snuck out from the relay station on an almost weekly basis just to get away from the structured schedule of a government employee. He wasn’t the only one who snuck away, and they always covered for each other. Life could get pretty boring when you were young and vibrant, and stuck in a dead-end job. Sneaking out to enjoy the nightlife of the nearest city was almost a requirement. If you didn’t do it, you were most likely a snitch for upper management.
But this was the first time he had broken an emergency curfew to sneak out in the light of day. It was far riskier than sneaking out at night, and he hoped his coworkers would be able to cover for him long enough to collect his reward and get back before he was missed. Even after he paid them all off, he would end up with more money in one night than he had been able to save from his meager salary over the previous ten years of dedicated service.
Tonight’s influx of cash might even put him over the top and enable him to pay off the family debt. A shiver ran up his spine as he thought of the possibility that the entire family could actually leave their government jobs behind and finally be able to look for work in the much more lucrative private sector. Maybe even take his first vacation since he began working fifty-hour weeks as a six-year-old boy.
The iron hinges groaned softly as the front door opened partway, followed immediately by a loud crash and a sharp cry from his uncle.
Darius heard several heavy boots rush into the front room followed by a commanding voice. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know who…” was all he heard his uncle could say before there was a gunshot.
Darius glanced around him quickly. This couldn’t be the stranger they were waiting for. His uncle had met the stranger a few times before and said that he was always polite and sincere. And always alone.
It could only mean one thing. He had been discovered missing from the government barracks and the Southern Marshal sent out her soldiers to track him down and kill him.
But how had they found him so quickly? He was certain he had not been followed on foot and he would have seen or heard any airships in the sky. Why didn’t the lookouts on the outskirts of town warn anyone that soldiers were coming?
Somehow, the soldiers had made it all the way to the center of town without triggering the active underground movement that seemed to know everything that took place in the city right before it happened.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to worry about how the soldiers had found him. The truth of the matter was, they had found him. The only thing he had time to worry about was how to get away.
The sound of boots rushing down the hallway from the front room sent him into action. Doors were kicked open followed by shouts of the word “clear” all along the hallway as the soldiers got closer to the kitchen.
He reached for the lock on the back door and froze as his heart jumped into his throat. The door handle was already being turned by somebody on the other side. All the commotion at the front of the house had masked the noise of soldiers approaching the back door. Now that he was focused on it, he could hear someone curse when the handle bumped against the lock and prevented whoever was on the other side from opening the door.
It didn’t matter who was on the other side. Darius could not escape through the back door, and the soldiers were about to enter the kitchen from the front hallway.
The small window over the sink darkened as someone peered in through the thick brown grime that covered the glass.
There were only three ways out of the kitchen. The hallway, the back door, and the window over the sink. And there were soldiers at every one of them. He was trapped with nowhere to go.
He was about to be caught and put to death as a spy. With the added fine levied against every relative of an executed spy, his family would never be able to work off the debt. Not even if they each lived to be five hundred years old. Because of his attempt to make some quick cash to clear the family debt, his entire family’s future, even those who had not been born yet, had suddenly gone up in smoke.
The basic instinct of survival kicked in and his eyes focused on the hearth in the corner of the kitchen. Up in smoke, he thought again. Or more likely, up with smoke.
Living a life in governmental servitude meant not getting very much to eat. One of the benefits was that you stayed very skinny. Maybe even skinny enough to fit up a chimney flue at sixteen years old.
The soldiers rushed in from the hallway just as the other group of soldiers broke through the back door. They all spilled into the kitchen at exactly the same time that Darius pulled his feet up into the chimney, and out of sight.
“The rest of the house is empty,” someone shouted.
“Nobody left out the back door. It was even locked from the inside when we got to it,” another voice said.
“I saw someone in here when I looked through the window,” a third voice said.
Darius climbed quietly up the chimney as he silently prayed that there were no loose stones for him to dislodge and send crashing back down into the kitchen.
The chimney became smaller as he climbed and he had to exhale deeply and take smaller breaths to keep from becoming wedged in the ever shrinking flue.
As he neared the top, it had become so thin he had to keep his arms above his head. His knees had less room to bend as he climbed. He felt the sudden rush of wind on his fingers as his hands passed the threshold of the top of the chimney.
He was almost out.